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Swinging Before the Sixties
The revival of swing music and the rebirth of grown-up culture.
by Nathaniel Taylor
Web exclusive
 If It Ain't Got That Swing: The Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture, by Mark Gauvreau Judge, Spence Publishing, 128 pp.; $22.95
I started swing dancing a few months before the rage began in 1998. I acted like a grown-up and felt like one too. Putting on a tie and vest, I was ready for a civilized night of dancing and conversation. The dance hall, Wabasha Caves, had entertained the mobsters who ran the Twin Cities during Prohibition. Now it offered a swing night once a week; you didn't have to worry about crowds. Then came a Gap commercial and suddenly we were parking blocks away, standing in line, and rubbing elbows in the bathroom. The swing craze had begun, and, according to Mark Gauvreau Judge, the future of America was a little bit brighter.
If It Ain't Got that Swing: The Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture is a socially conservative analysis of modern American culture that moves through the last 75 years quicker than a jitterbug. Judge assesses the culture of the twenties, thirties, and forties, then traces what he sees as a precipitous decline to the pop culture of today. Elvis, jazz, the sixties, freeways, cities, suburbs: all this and more figures in the story.
For Judge, the key to making sense of the transformation in American popular culture is the role of place. He focuses on "third places," a term borrowed from Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place. Distinct from both work and home, third places provide a nurturing social environment for seemingly doing nothing. They are the corner taverns, malt shops, local grocery stores, theaters, and dance halls—the places where people gather to talk. In third places the old and young interact; conversation becomes primary; and decency, dignity, and civility are fostered. (Strangely lacking from Judge's discussion of third places is the church and its role in forming community and adults.)
In the first half of the twentieth century, Judge argues, such third places shaped American popular culture. But in the postwar era, the rise of the suburbs brought the slow death of third places and thereby of community. While once-lively urban neighborhoods were abandoned or destroyed, the suburbs brought strip malls, tract housing, six-lane highways, and neighborhoods where no one knows their neighbors. Suburbs foster separation.
This loss of place, along with other factors, created an alienated generation of Americans and a "culture of narcissism," a me-first attitude and exaltation of the self. Beginning in the sixties, popular culture begin catering to a generation of screaming teenagers, rather than grown-ups. Ed Sullivan no longer played CLASSical music and Playhouse Theater was no longer on CBS. Culture began to serve adolescence, and the boomer never got around to growing up.
That's when swing dancing came to the rescue. The revival of swing dancing in 1998 jogged a memory of what was. For Judge, "Swing is nothing less than a pop culture revolt against the youth culture of the last forty years." He calls for a full-scale revival of grown-up culture with a grown-up morality. Judge isn't nostalgic for the Jim Crow laws and the cancerous prejudice of early twentieth-century America. Rather he seeks to reclaim the civility, decency, and responsibility of the past and graft it into the equality of the current culture.
Much has been lost in the revolt against the artificial, the formal, the conventional. For Judge—and for my friends and me—swing dancing is about CLASS and style. It is about feeling, looking, and acting sharp. It is about responsibility, decency, and dignity. It is a reminder to keep a beat, follow the steps, and treat your partner as a human, not an object. Swing, it seems, is about saving civilization.
A go-for-the-jugular journalist, Judge can be too caustic. He has good reasons for disliking post-1960 liberal trends, but the mockery and bitterness of his account become distracting after a while. In the end, though, what drives Judge is a passionate desire to reclaim popular culture, and anyone who shares that desire will find this book surprisingly encouraging.
Nathaniel Taylor is a student at Bethel College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
NOTE: For your convenience, the following product, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase from the ChristianityToday.com Shopping Channel:
• If It Ain't Got That Swing, Mark Gauvreau Judge
Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture Magazine.
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February 14, 2001
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